Weigel

All of Glenn Beck’s Hard Questions for Michele Bachmann

PORTSMOUTH, VA - MAY 03: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) listens as U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) (L) speaks during a campaign event at Crofton Industries May 3, 2012 in Portsmouth, Virginia. Bachmann, a former candidate for the Republican nomination, officially endorsed Romney’s campaign during the event. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

I’m working out of Capitol Hill today, where Rep. Michele Bachmann’s start-fight-then-run-away strategy is a source of much amusement. Yesterday, you’ll recall, Sen. John McCain took the unusual step of criticizing Bachmann, in a floor speech, for peddling questions about the Muslim Brotherhood connections and security status of Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin. Bachmann replied with a letter. And that was… just about it. No bevy of interviews to explain her side of this. No hallway scrums with reporters.

Instead, as is becoming sort of a joke, she hot-footed it to Glenn Beck’s show. The news, I guess, is that she reiterated that Rep. Keith Ellison, R-Minn., “has a long record of being associated with CAIR and with the Muslim Brotherhood” and that “CAIR is an unindicted co‑conspirator, as stated in the large terrorist financing case that we’ve had in the United States of America and so he came out and essentially wanted to shut down the inspectors general from even looking into any of the questions that we were asking.” But I’m just as interested in Beck’s easy questions.

GLENN:  Okay.  So you write this, which is your job.

GLENN:  Your duty to protect and defend the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

GLENN:  There is no question in any sane person’s mind that the Muslim Brotherhood ‑‑ I mean, look at this ‑‑ look at this guy who ran and won the presidency in Egypt.  He says, “Oh, I’m a moderate.  I’m a moderate.”  As soon as he wins, it’s Sharia law, we’re going down, you know, death for Allah is our highest goal.  It’s the all the same crap.  So ‑‑

GLENN:  Okay.  So when you wrote this letter, then Keith Ellison comes out.  And Keith Ellison is ‑‑ he has a record of being the Mafia hitman.

GLENN:  There’s more to this story that I think is even more outrageous.  Not only did they break their own laws, give this guy a special waiver, bring him into the White House.  This is a guy who is a known ‑‑ part of a known terrorist organization.  He then campaigns to have the blind sheikh released, but who pays for his airline ticket?

GLENN:  No, of course not.  Let me ‑‑ let me take you here because one of the more controversial things is you say Anthony Weiner’s wife will is ‑‑ has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Now, this is important because she works for Hillary Clinton.

GLENN:  And it’s not an unreasonable thing to ask seeing that this president and this administration has ‑‑ didn’t know ‑‑ apparently didn’t know that Van Jones was the founding ‑‑ one of the founding members of a radical revolutionary, anti‑American, Communist organization, and he’s in the White House.

GLENN:  So something is ‑‑ somebody’s dropping the ball some place, or somebody knows.

GLENN:  Right.  This has been ‑‑ I mean, your links and your footnotes ‑‑ and they’re down, by the way.  I don’t know if you know that, Michele.  But the Al‑Jazeera links that you put in and you said, here, go link ‑‑ go find the story on Al‑Jazeera.  We can’t get to them this morning.

GLENN:  Yeah, we’re going to have to get them because they’ve either been scrubbed or they’re being hammered, you know, by so much traffic which I highly doubt.

GLENN:  Yeah.  Let me just say this to you and then one more quick question.  I just wrote a letter to the president of my company for The Blaze and he’s in charge of all content.  He’s kind of our news, you know, our uber news director, if you will, he’s the president of content.  And I just said we know the truth on this story.  We’ve had this for a while.  I do not want this company to sit down on this.  So we are going to cover this and continue to cover this to make sure that people hear this story because, Michele, you guys are absolutely right and it is a matter of national survival.

GLENN:  Let me ask you one quick question.  John McCain and all of the elephant media are falling right in line with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Bullcrap.  What did John McCain do yesterday?

GLENN:  But you’re not saying that she is compromised?  You’re saying have we looked into this, right?

GLENN:  I have to tell you, we’re at war.  We’re at war with people in the Middle East, and her ‑‑ she’s compromised ‑‑ forget about the Muslim thing.  She’s compromised or could have been compromised.  Her husband was sending dirty photos of himself.  I mean, you know, in a wartime, you would never put that person in a delicate situation because the family has already been compromised.  But I digress.

I totally get that Bachmann, if she went on CNN, would have to field a bunch of leading questions that weren’t actually very studied. Is there no middle route, though? What’s the point of kicking up dust and then giving a small sample of the dust to a technician who already agrees with you?

Also, what are the odds that the House GOP gives her two more years in which to release sort of half-baked accusations with the heft of a “Member of the House Select Committee on Intellgence”?